CKW locates the most rewarding areas for district heating networks

AI software for urban energy planning supports Swiss utility in locating most rewarding areas for district heating networks

Source: Urbio
Urbio 2.1

What was the problem that Urbio solved for CKW?

The goal of CKW, a leading utility in central Switzerland, was to know which areas to prioritise for a new district heating network (DHN) deployment. Today, this activity involves a lot of manual efforts: collecting building attributes from spreadsheets, applying complex formulas for estimating demands and mapping this data to footprints in a GIS tool for visualisation and prospection purposes.

The challenges the company faced were:

  • Lack of data on buildings and areas of interest
  • Changing environment requiring multiple repetitions of analyses
  • Time-consuming methodology for evaluating multiple scenarios

How has Urbio solved this?

With Urbio, the full process was automated, hours of work were saved, and the team could  focus on the exploration of scenarios with the support of maps and key metrics.

This was achieved by the centralization of data in the Urbio platform, the use of an intuitive Digital Twin to visualise and filter the high-value areas, and then the automatic calculation of key decision metrics for the project (kW, kWh/y, CO2, etc.).  At the end, the engineer gathered all the insights into a comprehensive report containing generated maps, as well as the key metrics and exported building data for each scenario.

Metrics of Success:

  • 5x faster analysis enabled by instant map generation and computation of metrics
  • Faster ROI achieved by sorting out and focusing on the most high-impact buildings
  • 3x more scenarios evaluated within the area of interest for feasibility studies
  • Higher data accuracy guaranteed by relying on certified industry norms and enhanced by Machine Learning and energy models
  • Streamlined workflow from data import to visualisation of building data, to calculation of key project metrics
I used Urbio for several district heating network projects in order to accelerate the development of our renewable activities. I am very happy with the results, in particular the screenshots and metrics which I showcased to our partners.
- Rafael Mesey, Head of Department New Energy, CKW

Urbio is a SaaS platform and does not require any installation or deployment: data and models are readily available for users to immediately start working. Optionally, users can easily import their own data via an intuitive graphical interface.

Users are fully operational on the platform in under 2 hours: all onboarding material is available as multiple short media sessions.